Ronan Bennett: ‘I’m not the only Irish person to criticise an Irish man in the White House for a lack of solidarity’

Eighteen years after the publication of his previous novel, Zugzwang, the Belfast-born author Ronan Bennett returns with Jaq: A Top Boy Story. As literary hiatuses go, it’s a long one, but, as the book’s subtitle suggests, he has not been idle.

Jaq is a novelisation of the fifth and final series of his acclaimed crime drama, which aired last September, the programme having been revived by Netflix in 2019 with the support of the rapper Drake after Channel 4 dropped the show despite two successful series in 2011 and 2013.

Set in a predominantly black housing estate in the inner London borough of Hackney, where Bennett has lived for more than 20 years, the show revolves around the violent activities of a drug gang but always makes room for other issues, such as discrimination, deprivation, gentrification and the threat of deportation, as well as the characters’ complex personal lives. Jasmine Jobson was twice nominated for a Bafta for her powerful portrayal of Jaq, a ruthless yet ultimately caring drug dealer whose gender and sexuality made her, in her creator’s words, “an outsider in a world of outsiders”.

But why wait until the final series of his hit TV series to turn it into a novel? And why focus on Jaq rather than on the main characters, the gang leaders Dushane and Sully? Did Top Boy’s ending free him somehow?

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“Very much,” says Bennett, who is speaking from the Spanish city of Cádiz, where he has a second home – one of the perks of a hugely successful writing career.

“I held on to the novelisation rights right from the start, which indicates I had in mind for a long time to do something in fiction based on Top Boy. I was excited about the character of Jaq, interested to explore that world from the point of view of a young woman, gay, in the inner circle but not quite.”

He has no time for those who say writers should stick to their own experiences, “as if being one thing precludes you from writing about another”.

“It is reductive and dismaying for a writer to be told you can’t write this because it is not your experience, that I can only write about the experience of a straight man growing up in my generation in Belfast. It would be the end of art.

“Obviously, I’m not from that world. To treat that world and the people in it with respect, you have to listen carefully, not trample over their world and impose your sensibilities. Try to immerse yourself in that world, find out what’s said, felt, believed, what dreams exist.

“How do you do it? It’s listening when they are talking to you directly but also when they are talking to other people. It’s not hard. It’s what journalists and writers do all the time, find someone who knows things, knows the history. When I hear people say it’s thoroughly researched, no one should expect brownie points for doing the basics. But once we’re up and running, any writer has to feel completely free to write what they want.”

There has always been a strong Irish aspect to Top Boy, with Lisa Dwan, Barry Keoghan and Brian Gleeson playing significant roles. Sully’s real name is Gerard Sullivan, hinting at his part-Irish heritage

Witnessing a young boy dealing near his local supermarket piqued Bennett’s interest in the subject, but he needed the help of a respected local man, Gerry Jackson, his personal trainer, to vouch for him and introduce him to people who gave him the insights he needed to create the fictional world of the Summerhouse estate. Jackson became a script consultant for the series.

But there are parallels between Bennett’s experience of the police as a Belfast republican and that of black youths in London. One character in Jaq describes the Metropolitan Police as “just like another London gang”.

At the premiere of a previous season of Top Boy, he said he was inspired by a notorious photograph of a “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” sign in an English boarding-house window and by Phil Lynott’s “More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish” T-shirt.

“I came from a community that was demonised, discriminated against,” he said. “When I came to London the black, brown community was equally treated with suspicion.

“Jaq was written during and after the controversies that have engulfed the Met in the last couple of years to do with sexual violence, corruption. If you’ve lived a bit you’ll have a perspective on the Met, know it had a very troubled history – the corruption of Scotland Yard and the flying squad.”

The author had his own run-ins with the Met, of which more anon.

There has always been a strong Irish aspect to Top Boy, with Lisa Dwan, Barry Keoghan and Brian Gleeson playing significant roles. Sully’s real name is Gerard Sullivan, hinting at his part-Irish heritage. “I would like to have explored that. When you get 10 hours you think you’d be able to go off on tangents, but the world we created was so dense and rich there just was not the time to explore everything.”

Mandy is a community activist whose social conscience was formed in prison. She tries to interest Jaq in the writings of Bernadette Devlin as well as black heroes such as Angela Y Davis and persuades her to join a demonstration against the planned deportation of her friend Kieran.

“I wanted it not to be just about gangs and guns. I wanted that other side. The scene in the final season and the book of stopping the removal of Kieran was based on a real event that took place in Glasgow in 2021. That was a rare win for community activism against the establishment.”

[ Eileen Battersby interviews Ronan Bennett in 1998 on publication of The Catastrophist ]

Bennett’s return to fiction would be unremarkable except that he has written two of the best contemporary Irish novels. The Catastrophist, from 1998, a souring love story, set against the backdrop of Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese independence movement, that was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, drew comparisons to Graham Greene. Havoc, in its Third Year, from 2004, about a good man’s struggle to do the right thing in 17th-century Puritan England, which won the Irish novel-of-the-year award, bears comparison to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

In the same way that Joseph O’Connor sees Star of the Sea as the real start of his career as a mature writer, Bennett acknowledges that his first two novels, The Second Prison, from 1991, and Overthrown by Strangers, from a year later, while full of promise, were apprentice works. “For sure. I didn’t really know what I was doing with the first two books. Some debut novels are amazing. I wasn’t in that category; I had to learn. The first two were written quickly – six months each – but it wasn’t so much the time spent writing; it was the time spent thinking.”

Before the events of October 7th, I’d already started work on a script about Palestine. Whatever tiny thing you do, anyone who shows any intertest or solidarity, they say thank you, because Palestinians feel so abandoned

Zugzwang, from 2006, which was first serialised in the Observer, was another historical thriller; set in St Petersburg in 1914, it tackled chess, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. But Bennett’s growing success as a screenwriter meant his fiction was sidelined.

Honestly, there are enough mediocre novels in the world for me to add to that list. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was writing. It is a depressing truth that most artistic endeavour is mediocre.

“There have been a couple of failed attempts. Honestly, there are enough mediocre novels in the world for me to add to that list. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was writing. It is a depressing truth that most artistic endeavour is mediocre. It’s painful because you want to produce something special. If I suspect what I’m writing isn’t special then I can’t proceed.”

I first interviewed Bennett in 1993 when the BBC screened Love Lies Bleeding, a prescient Troubles drama starring Mark Rylance as a released IRA prisoner struggling to navigate a post-ceasefire landscape, and again the following year when Channel 4 screened A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, a London-Irish drama set to a Pogues soundtrack. His first feature film, A Further Gesture (1997), starring Brendan Gleeson and Stephen Rea, also had a Troubles theme. David Trimble tried to have his 2001 series Rebel Heart, a major BBC drama about the Irish War of Independence that was loosely based on Ernie O’Malley’s life, banned.

But Bennett’s career has gone from strength to strength, and his range has expanded. His TV series include Fields of Gold (2002), written with the then Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, about GM crops; Hidden (2011), a thriller starring Philip Glenister; and Gunpowder (2017), with Kit Harrington as Robert Catesby, who with Guy Fawkes conspired to blow up the British parliament. Feature films include Face (1997), a superb heist movie starring Robert Carlyle; the prison-break comedy Lucky Break (2001); The Hamburg Cell (2004), about the 9/11 bombers; and Public Enemies (2009), starring Johnny Depp as the bank robber John Dillinger.

His multimillion-euro remake of The Day of the Jackal as a series for Sky, starring Eddie Redmayne and directed by the Armagh-born film-maker Brian Kirk, is due out at the end of the year. Like Top Boy, it has a strong Irish element, Bennett says.

His current project could not be more topical. “Before the events of October 7th, I’d already started work on a script about Palestine. I wanted to do a drama showing the story from the Palestinian side. I’ve found whatever tiny thing you do, anyone who shows any interest or solidarity, they say thank you, because Palestinians feel so abandoned.”

The solo art of novel writing is a blessed break from screenwriting by committee, he says.

“Writing the novel after 15 years of screenplays was unbelievably pleasant and stress-free. My publisher Jamie Byng completely believed in it. I wasn’t sure Top Boy’s hardcore fans would be interested in a novel, and people who didn’t know Top Boy, why would they read it? It took him probably two to three years to convince me that I was wrong and he was right. Time will tell, but I’m glad he persuaded me.

“These days with big-budget screenplays, executives now crawl all over the scripts. Everyone has an opinion. As one of my agents put it, this is the only business in which people with no accomplishments can tell people with lots of accomplishments what to do. I get far more notes now than I did when I started 30 years ago. Having lots of people giving their opinions on something is not a recipe for success.”

Bennett turned 68 this week but looks at least a decade younger, although with his postpandemic beard he looks more grizzled than chiselled these days. “I am grateful to be grey-bearded and grey-haired. Honestly, I’m just grateful to be here still when so many of those we love are not. I say, give me those birthdays,” he says.

His wife, Georgina Henry, then deputy editor of the Guardian, died of cancer 10 years ago next month, three months after my wife, Nikki, died. We had kept in touch over the years, so we met up the next time I was back in London, to reflect on our shared experience. Some of the most powerful passages in Jaq, and in Top Boy generally, are reflections on grief and loss.

“Losing someone is like being in a car crash,” Sully tells a bereaved Jaq. “You survive but you walk away with a limp. You’re gonna have that limp for the rest of your life.”

I recognise the sentiment, but Bennett tells me they are in fact my own words. Writers, even in mourning, are magpies. “That’s what writers do: everything goes into the mix. Obviously, the grief passages in Jaq come directly from Georgina’s death.”

“Ask me what time it is. I don’t know. Ask me what day it is. I don’t know. Ask me what year it is. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s day or night. I don’t know if the sky is blue. I don’t know what colour the leaves on the trees are. I don’t know left from right. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know anything. I’m numb.”

He recalls reading a grief memoir in which the author says not 10 minutes go by that they don’t think about their lost love but people don’t believe them. “Ten years on, it’s pretty close to 10 minutes,” he says. “It is a bit like being hit over the head with a hammer, but you know you need to become unconcussed for the sake of your children.”

His son, Finn, is an actor who stars alongside Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country. His daughter, Molly, has just graduated from Trinity College Dublin. It delighted him that she studied in Ireland, but “it was entirely her decision. I’m not a helicopter parent. I’ve just tried to be present and calm and thoughtful or kind. Their mother was more than half Irish, though in person she couldn’t be more English. Obviously I’m very keen for them to explore that side of their heritage. Molly was a bit shocked by the attitude of some students in the South to northerners, not seeing them as Irish; she just thought of the Irish as one people.

“There was a wonderful Irish ambassador in London, Bobby McDonagh, who used to do these Embassy parties, and someone from the South called me a plastic Paddy. It was shocking and hurtful, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon that saddens every northerner.”

The conflict in the North has shaped Bennett’s life, even though he left Belfast in the mid-1970s and has never moved back. He has worked on a film script that covers the period from the Battle of the Bogside to Bloody Sunday and said recently that he felt the time might be right to tell the story of the Troubles in a novel, but I wonder whether he has considered writing a memoir, given his own remarkable life.

“I would have to convince myself that it wasn’t an exercise in narcissism, that it would have some value for a potential reader,” he says. “At the minute I’m not sure what that would be.”

He co-authored Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford, the 1990 memoir of Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four wrongly convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. Bennett himself was wrongly convicted of the 1974 murder of an RUC inspector, William Elliott, during an Official IRA bank robbery in Belfast. He was cleared in 1975 after a formative year in Long Kesh, during which the prison was burned down by republican inmates, which he recounted in Fire and Rain, a BBC radio documentary from 1994.

[ Fire and Rain by Ronan Bennett: the burning of Long Kesh in October 1974 ]

His status as a former convict cuts little ice back home. “I do get teased back in Belfast. ‘Ronan, you were hardly in long enough to have a shower, a shave, a shite and a smoke.’ Typical Belfast humour.”

He moved to England, mixing in radical, anarchist circles. In 1978 police raided his London flat and found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, wigs, false moustaches, balaclavas and false documents. He was charged with “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown”, then spent 20 months on remand before conducting his own defence at the Old Bailey, sitting in T-shirt and jeans alongside the barristers Michael Mansfield, Helena Kennedy and Geoffrey Robertson, who were representing other defendants in the case. This fed into his debut novel, The Second Prison, from 1991.

He graduated with a first in history from King’s College London, where he met Georgina, who was born in Aden to a future colonel in the British army of Irish Protestant background. He was awarded a PhD on crime and law enforcement in 17th-century England, which would feed into Havoc, in its Third Year; that same year he was hired by Jeremy Corbyn, the future leader of the British Labour Party, as a parliamentary researcher focusing on the Guildford Four case before MPs voted to rescind his security pass.

Had Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell won the British election there would have been real change, and that is why the establishment in the Labour Party as well as outside rallied against him, as they knew he was an existential threat

He is disappointed at the way the world has gone in recent years but not disillusioned, he insists. The Israeli onslaught on Gaza particularly appals him. “Some international solidarity at government level would be useful here. I’m not the only Irish person to criticise an Irish man in the White House for a lack of solidarity. What he has failed to understand from the history of his own people about colonialism. These are dark times, no question.”

[ Top Boy creator Ronan Bennett on his time in Long Kesh and the hunger strikes ]

The British Labour Party’s treatment of Corbyn, his old boss, appals him, reminding him of Chris Mullin’s novel, A Very British Coup.

“Had Jeremy and John [McDonnell] won, there would have been real change and that is why the establishment in the Labour Party as well as outside rallied against him, as they knew he was an existential threat. What the party did to Jeremy is unforgivable.”

When we spoke in 1994, he described the British position post-ceasefire as “the beginning of the long goodbye”. Have things moved more glacially than he expected?

“Honestly, I don’t think I expected to see a united Ireland before I was 70. Decolonisation is a process; it’s not going to happen instantly. I’m a supporter of a united Ireland, and it has to be done with consent. I can see increasing signs for hope there. People from the Protestant tradition are looking increasingly North-South rather than east-west, but there’s a long way to go. It won’t be easy. But the sooner the conversation starts in the South among the political leadership in earnest the better, because they are just kicking the can down the road otherwise.”

Jaq: A Top Boy Story, by Ronan Bennett, is published by Canongate